Not so long ago, the job of product manager was about assessing market data, creating requirements, and managing the hand-off to sales/marketing. Maybe you’d talk to a customer somewhere in there and they’d tell you what features they wanted. But companies that manage product that way are dying.
Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time.
This course will help you along your learning journey and prepare you with the skills and perspective you need to:
Create the actionable focus to successfully manage your product (week 1)
Focus your work using modern product management methods (week 2)
Manage new products and explore new product ideas (week 3)
Manage and amplify existing products (week 4)
This course is ideal for current product or general managers interested in today's modern product management methods.
This course was developed with the generous support of the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

NK

This course covers all the necessary and much required fundamentals about the product management. The course structure is very well balanced and covers all the aspects of product management. Thanks

JW

May 23, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

I'm totally a Newbie about Digital Product Management. I learn a lot of New Things. I hope this Certificate will advance my career. Thank you Professor Alex Cowan for teaching me a lot of things.

From the lesson

Using Today's Product Management Methods

You’ve probably heard that the days of ‘build it and they will come’ are over. But what exactly should you be doing instead? There’s no shortage of material out there on how to be innovative--but you only have so much time. This week we’ll step through the method’s today’s most successful product managers are using and give you tips to “sell” those methods to your stakeholders. We’ll also show you how to analyze growth, engagement and monetization using qualitative and quantitative methods. You’ll finish the week with an understanding of which methods to apply when and hear from practitioners who are using these methods to make breakthrough products.

Taught By

Alex Cowan

Faculty & Batten Fellow

Transcript

In this video, we're going to talk about how to use some of the methods you've learned and apply them to a project that has a hardware component. Here a few focal points for you to talk about. One is Yes, You Can do these things with hardware. I got the question a lot of the time I do hardwares, or I do medical, so I can't do any of this. Right? And the answer is No. There's a lot of it you can do. Two, we're going to look at how we create flexible versus inflexible UI's. Emphasis on flexible ones. Third, we're going to look at how we can decompose a really complicated big product into small pieces that are more amenable to some of the methods that you've learned here. And finally, we're going to look at how you can think through the whole product experience, to use some of these techniques and innovate kind of around the product. First of all, Yes, You Can. These are some hardware products that were put on Indiegogo and they raised tons of money. And this is a great way to test our hardware product. If you build it, they may not come. That's the lesson of Lean Startup, and the idea is to generate demand signals before you spend a lot of money building something. And yes you see right, these gentlemen in Australia raised $13 million on this kind of new type of beehive. I've used it. There are some issues with the African beetle, Aethina tumida invading it, but overall it's a pretty awesome beehive. I got to say. And this is another example here, WaterSeer. This is a device that creates water out of thin air supposedly. Does it sound a little impossible? Yes. Did I just send them 250 bucks to see if it works? I did, because it sounds so awesome, they look credible, and we'll just see what happens. The lesson here is, not go use kickstarter or go using Indiegogo, but that there are ways to reach your audience and see if they're interested beforehand. If this isn't right for your company, webinars are a great way to gauge interest. Hold the webinar on the topic you're thinking of building a product around, and see how many people come. Trade shows or breakout sessions within trade shows are another great venue to do this if that's more applicable to what you do. Flexible versus inflexible UIs. It's easy to innovate on hardware if you have an interface so you can constantly update and you see this all over the place. And here we see the innovation intensive interface of the Tesla, there's a giant screen here, there's a giant screen here, and they update these all the time. Several times a month. And here we see the dashboard of a Mercedes and they obviously it's not amenable to change. Yes I know these LCDs are very expensive to build but, I think that, I mean for instance, Tesla or some of the other products they have these like the nest thermostat, or office telephones that have an LCD, they've decided that the desirability driver is worth investing in these LCDs and that they'll make the feasibility and viability work around that. But that said, LCDs aren't the only way. Voice interfaces are coming of age, and the screen that the user interacts with your product through doesn't necessarily need to be on the product itself. I mean, I have a thermostat, it has an LCD on the front of it, but I also have a nice smoke alarm and CO2 alarm, and that I just interact with through an app and it has no interface on the front of it. And that works great too. So that may be an option for you. And the point is that you think about three things here. One is, make sure your interface is task appropriate. That doesn't mean if it doesn't need an LCD, don't put one obviously. Make sure it's amenable to doing updates because if you can't update these things readily or the customer prevents you from updating them or they have to initiate the update but if they don't, then obviously, this thing doesn't help you. And thirdly, if you can, make sure it's flexible and amenable to change, and you'll afford yourself a lot of room to innovate and iterate. This thing obviously, doesn't have a lot of screen real estate, a teeny bit here but probably not super amenable to updates, but if we look at a big huge industrial machine like this, I mean we could still build a prototype say of this part and say to a user, "hey, on this prototype, can you show me how you would wiggle the giggle-plex or whatever this thing does and you can try it out and you can see if it works, you can run design sprints around those things?" So, functional decomposition of certain things is a great way to test these things out, even if they are a big huge assembly that takes years to design and build. You can get ahead of that and you can try things early. And then finally if there's kind of the whole product, and then the solution is that whole product, and there's your core product and it's medical device or it's got to be you know frozen and takes two years to build, and you can't touch it, and they're still going to be other stuff, like let's say you have a novel device for administering something that nurses or technicians need to learn how to use. Well, the documentation on that and the ways you explain it to them through a piece of paper, or an app, or a video, those things for instance, you probably can change more regularly than you can change the core product. So, do look at those opportunities. I get questions at talks or classes. "Well, I do hardware so I can't do any of this stuff." I think they're kind of asking me, "do I have an excuse not to do any of this because it seems hard?' And the answer is, no you don't. You should give it a try. Not all of these things will be applicable to all products, but many of them will probably be applicable to some products. So, if you're working on a hardware, and you're wondering how to apply some of the methods we talked about, I would consider it through these lenses here, and I think you may find a few places where you can innovate possibly a bit more than maybe you thought.

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